


Everything Free

by ladyflowdi



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-12
Updated: 2013-07-12
Packaged: 2017-12-19 07:22:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/881021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyflowdi/pseuds/ladyflowdi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The many loves of John Sheppard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything Free

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this back in 2008, as a prompt from my f-list that just ballooned.

John has had sex with a lot of women.

It isn’t something he’s particularly proud of, in the way he isn’t particularly proud of smoking a couple of Wraith, or getting his paperwork done on time. It is what it is, the simple truth. He’s had beautiful blonds, vivacious brunettes and fiery redheads, and even a couple with colors not found in nature. He’s taken virgins, milky thighs trembling around his hips, pink mouths open and gasping, and he’s been taken by women more content with having control. He’s had women in every conceivable type of bed, up against walls, over tables, in bathroom stall; in cars, on couches and chairs and floors. He isn’t Gene Simmons or anything, but yeah, John has had sex with a whole lot of women.

He’s been in relationships too, of course he has -- he was married, wasn’t he? And she was a beautiful woman, with beautiful breasts and beautiful eyes and a beautiful mind, maybe the most caring and compassionate human being he’d ever met. John likes to think that Nancy was the culmination of too many years of one night stands and failed relationships, one last go before he admitted his biggest truth. Nancy was the first woman he cheated on that he felt guilty about.

John has had sex with four men, and unlike the many women he’s had throughout the years, he remembers each of them. Mario was the first, a terrified back-room fuck in a bar that somehow became a regular occurrence, a mutual scratching of an itch. They fucked in public until John invited him to the apartment he lived in after Nancy, and there they fucked in John’s bed. John never opened his thighs, never really had to think about it -- Mario was all too willing to bend over and take it, dark night grunting with his fingers tangled in John’s sheets.

John didn’t notice the first time, or even the second or third times, too busy with more important things like cocks and asses to pay attention to Mario beyond that. The fourth time, though, they fucked with the lights on, and it was the first time John noticed the pockmarked bullet-wound scars marring Mario’s heaving back.

They weren’t much for talking, he and Mario, but after the sex that left Mario trembling and John drenched in sweat, he asked him.

“The scars?” Mario turned his head to stare at him, dark hair falling over his eyes. He kept it too long, though John didn’t say that. “What about them?”

“You in a gang?”

Mario snorted and stared at the ceiling. “You could say that.” For one second, in the shadows of John’s room, he looked like a haunted man, his face pulled and contorted in ugly lines that spoke of old pain.

John remembered the way his heart had kicked into gear, the bile that had risen in his throat. “What does that mean?”

“I was military, a lifetime ago. Army,” Mario had said. His eyes had been huge and round in the dark when John wrenched himself away and yanked his shorts on. “The fuck, John? I didn’t think you’d give a shit.”

“Maybe you don’t know me very well,” John spat, and threw his clothes at him.

That had been the end of Mario.

The second man was a year and a half later, long after the sting of Mario had faded, and after the many one night stands he had with the equally faceless women who never let him stick his dick up their asses. He met Will at a supermarket in Tampa, an enormous, ripped guy with a silver earring and skin the color of coffee. In the few months they were together Will was caring like Nancy had been, but unyielding in a way John didn’t realize he’d needed until they met. Will didn’t bend over for him, didn’t get on his knees for him. Will made John find what it was he’d been unwilling to let himself look for. He was the one who fucked John for the first time, no matter how loud John raged -- his fingers thick and deep and so wanted inside, and then his cock, huge, splitting John open at the seams. John screamed and cursed through the first time, first in fury, then in pain, then in sweet, aching pleasure. Will took him there with patience, slow and unhurried.

The problem with Will was that he did everything for his own pleasure. He was a good guy who liked it when his boys fought. It didn’t mean he cared for John any less, it just meant that John found himself dangerously close to a precipice he was unwilling, and unable, to fall from. They had a huge fight, and then Will took his legs out from underneath him and fucked the hell out of him there on the living room floor. It was the first time John hated himself, and the last time he saw Will.

After that, John went to Afghanistan, where he blew up cities, and killed people, and went steadily out of his mind. Mitch and Dex were John’s bunk mates out there on the ass end of nowhere. They were good guys, rowdy, down south good ole’ boys with chips on their shoulders and excitement that went nowhere fast. Any soldier who’d been out on the battle field knew that it was weeks, sometimes months of inaction between spurts of violence, and it was Mitch and Dex who kept John grounded, who kept the guilt at bay. It was Mitch and Dex who introduced him to Lee.

Lee was from Arizona, the son of a career truck driver who’d had big plans and big dreams, the kind of kid who grew up to do nothing special but love a woman and raise a family. He’d gotten money for school and in return he’d given the Air Force four years of his life, he’d told John that first night he lay panting between John’s squeezing thighs. When he was done he wanted to buy a little house and make babies, wanted to sell _cars_ like his big brother did if it meant that he’d get to give his family a better life than his father had given him.

When John wrote home to Lee’s mom, he didn’t tell her that her boy had died screaming.

After that John went to Antarctica and forgot about everything. He forgot about loyalty and respect, forgot about what was right and decent in this world, forgot about the people that had once counted on him. It was so easy to let it all go, to just shed away all the extra, like peeling off a cheap suit or slipping out of a skin that had gotten too tight.

He met Rodney in late September, the year of Atlantis. It seems stupid and cliché to say that John was in love with him from the first moment, because of all the things they are, cliché isn’t one of them, but still, it’s a fact, something too deep, too embedded in the fabric of himself to pretend doesn’t exist. John was too old even then to play stupid games, and from the moment Rodney comes into HQ at McMurdo demanding Oreo cookies and porn ASAP, what the hell did they expect him to function on?, bright and loud in his thick blue coat and big snapping hands, John loved him. He’d been so _there_ in a way so few people were that it was easy, so easy for John to reclaim all the parts Antarctica had taken from him like they’d never gone anywhere to begin with.

The first time they have sex it’s in the cozy warmth of John’s bed on Atlantis, with Rodney’s shaking fingers on his thigh, his back sweat-slick under John’s hand. It’s give and take, twist and pull and yank and thrust. It isn’t like with any of the others, who all demanded something from John in their own way; Rodney expects nothing, and he’s humbled by what he’s given. It humbles John in return, forces him to recognize a mirrored hurt as they slide together, unhurried to get anywhere fast. It could have been so easy for Rodney to take, what with all the suppressed strength in his body, or to greedily yield and expect to be taken. That he doesn’t do either of those things is a new concept in John’s world view, despite all the many men and women he’s had, despite the failed relationships and failed marriage and failed _life_. No one has ever been willing to meet him halfway and it surges through John’s body, makes him yell out and just as suddenly their lovemaking isn’t so unhurried -- pull and thrust, rolling across John’s sheets. He slips his hand under Rodney’s arched back, touches his lips to that gasping mouth, and lets Rodney pant and moan and go wet between them.

When Rodney kisses him it’s like everything in the world centered down to the perfect moments of John’s life, free of guilt and anger and fear. Rodney kisses him like he has no faults, like there’s something worth it there between John’s trembling thighs, in his parted lips. Rodney kisses him with forgiveness.


End file.
